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Professor Martha Young-Scholten is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition (SLA). Professor Young-Scholten was born in Hanover, New Hampshire and obtained a Masters in linguistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her PhD at the same institution concerned the structure of phonology in a second language. She has been a Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom since September 2006.〔Young-Scholten (1993).〕 ==The Minimal Trees Hypothesis== Professor Young-Scholten is most notable within linguistics and SLA for developing the ''Minimal Trees Hypothesis'' with Anna Vainikka,〔Vainikka & Young-Scholten (1994; 1996; 1998).〕 an "important theory," where 'tree' is a metaphor of syntax for the branching structure showing how words of a phrase or sentence co-relate.〔Vainikka & Young-Scholten (2003).〕 The hypothesis concerns what aspects of a language learner's first language (L1) is carried over into the grammar of their second language (L2), in addition to mechanisms of universal grammar that allow new acquisition to take place. Whereas many researchers lean towards a 'Full Transfer' view in which all the L1 grammar transfers〔Unsworth, Parodi, Sorace & Young-Scholten (2005).〕 - i.e. the initial state of the L2 is the final state of the first - Young-Scholten and Vainikka have argued that only lexical categories (e.g. the noun phrase) are drawn from the L1, and that functional categories (e.g. the inflectional phrase that represents tense) do not; rather, the learner 'grows' new ones because they start their L2 acquisition with only a 'minimal' syntactic tree. Several competing accounts for the role of transfer and universal grammar persist in SLA; the Minimal Trees Hypothesis remains particularly controversial, and has been strongly critiqued in syntactic research on both empirical and conceptual grounds: some researchers argue that linguistic behaviour does not follow the model,〔e.g. White (1991), for French.〕 and others claim that it is theoretically misconceived.〔White (2003: 68-78), for review; Schwartz & Sprouse (1994); Schwartz (1998).〕 For example, the idea that a component of language could be absent from the initial stage, so that the system selectively extracts only one part of the L1, is unacceptable to those who favour 'Full Transfer' rather than 'Partial Transfer'.〔Schwartz & Sprouse (1996).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Martha Young-Scholten」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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